


child soldiers, redux

by Raria



Category: Animorphs - Katherine A. Applegate, Ender's Game - All Media Types
Genre: Battle School (Ender's Game), Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-15
Updated: 2020-07-15
Packaged: 2021-03-04 21:15:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,879
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25293049
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Raria/pseuds/Raria
Summary: Animorphs in Battle School.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 9





	child soldiers, redux

1.

Cassie knew better than anyone that they’d made a mistake, bringing her to Battle School.

She was seven when she’d nearly aged out of the program for good. She heard a lot of reluctant protests floating around, adults murmuring about her wasted potential. But everyone knew by that point that she was the wrong kind of kid for it. Too gentle. Cassie had felt guilty, letting them all down like that, but it was nothing compared to the shock of relief.

And then on her third-to-last day the monitor found her in the woods, calmly and methodically cutting into the side of a struggling squirrel with a pocketknife.

For anyone else it would have been too much, she knew. The sort of psychopath-flag behavior that got you cut for being too unbalanced. But for a girl whose only failing had always been her empathy, this new data point in the algorithm put her just barely in the right range.

Some of them thought she did it on purpose. Every kid wanted to go to Battle School, no wonder a girl faced with missing her chance would veer off the edge a little. But they didn’t care, because that was enough too, ambition strong enough to break rules when things got desperate was something they could work with.

So she watched them rush around changing their plans and getting ready to send her into space and she swallowed down the unwanted truth of it, that all she’d been doing was trying to cut away the razor wire wrapped tight around the squirrel’s body. That she’d killed it the moment she realized it wasn’t going to survive, as quickly as she knew how. But they’d mistaken her mercy for cruelty and they liked her better that way, so who was Cassie to correct them? Who was Cassie to disappoint them all again, even if it meant letting her parent’s eyes go shuttered when they looked at their peaceful vicious daughter?

When she got up there she was good at most of it. She was good at the schoolwork and the games and especially the people, enough that she started hearing the adults whispering again, about empathy and mind games and understanding the enemy. She wasn’t great at combat games but she was phenomenal at social ones, and the two blended together enough up here that people mostly saw what they wanted to.

Kindness didn’t get you far in Battle School. In fact, it didn’t get you anywhere, except maybe iced. So Cassie was careful, careful, that they never saw her as kind. It took a certain awful brand of determination, pretending again and again that soft words were calculating, that friendship was alliances, that gentleness was manipulation.

On the days she doubted most, when the shivers under her skin pushed her to go to the teachers and confess, give up, tell them she wasn’t supposed to be here anymore, she’d go down to the video room and pull up tapes of the first invasion. She’d watch over and over as the buggers razed the earth, as the planet grieved, and something she could almost call hate would slip into her veins all soft and cool until the trembling stopped. And then she’d put away the tapes exactly where she found them and go quietly back up to her geometry homework.

Cassie’s best friend had left for Battle School a year and a half earlier than she herself did, and Cassie tracked down Rachel within two days of being brought up. There were a lot of things they didn’t talk about, but also a lot of things they did, and even when the baffled glances from classmates turned sly and knowing they’d still sneak off together and catch up at least once a week. Rachel never asked Cassie how in the world she’d qualified for this brutal program, and Cassie never told her. Rachel knew the best and worst of her, but Cassie wasn’t sure which this was.

When she met Rachel’s cousin Jake he looked her in the eye and she felt a tiny bit of her postured coldness crack, and she started thinking about the difference between _nice_ and _kind_ , between _kind_ and _good._ She started looking for the hints of any of those things in the people around her, and every so often she wondered if any of them were painting viciousness over themselves too. Occasionally she wondered if it was remotely reasonable to thank someone for seeing straight through you.

2.

Tobias was born in space. So when he failed out of Battle School for the fourth and final time, they had nowhere to send him.

At first there had been all sorts of uproar about a kid being there who hadn’t been chosen, and a different kind of uproar about the cruelty of not letting him experience a normal childhood on earth, but it had mostly all died down by the time he was old enough to remember it. It helped that he turned out pretty smart, as he grew up, and both the hostile and pitying glances gradually morphed into slightly more speculative ones.

It took Tobias a lot longer to learn to walk than to fly. Zero gravity came easily to a restless kid, balancing on two legs and a permanently curved floor was harder. As early as he could remember he knew that the best way to stay out of everyone’s way was to spend hours at a time floating in corners of the less-used practice rooms. He learned how to imitate a frozen, drifting Launchy and got very good at being forgotten.

And he watched wave after wave of Launchies learning to move awkwardly, cautiously, for an hour at a time before going gratefully back to their solid ground, and couldn’t quite put words to the ball of tension trapped in his chest. It was something like pity cut with something like jealousy, and he almost wished he could sample what it was like to find the floor reassuring.

The other place Tobias spent his childhood (if you can call the phase of life that ends by age four a childhood) was the game room, of course. He’d play the computer when everyone was in classes, or battles, or bed. When he got big enough to pass for a Launchy he played the older students a couple times, but he quit asking after he won too many times in a row and the sidelong glances turned venomous.

Sometimes he felt like he was better at controlling the games than he was at directing his own body. Bird’s-eye view flying was his default, it seemed, and first-person hallway navigation was just clumsy unintuitive necessity. His skin never quite fit right and his eyes didn’t focus fast enough. For a long while he had an irrational fear of being locked in the hallways, trapped on the ground, and his occasional dreams about visiting Earth were almost inevitably nightmares.

When the IF finally shrugged and let him into the basic classes, Tobias took to them like a duck to rocket science- that is to say, not all that well, despite what abstract ideas about flight instincts might tell you. Math was like walking all over again, an awkward and time-consuming version of something he could do just as well by intuition. After the third frustrated teacher he gave up explaining that no, he hadn’t copied his classmate’s answers, he’d just seen the physics of the problem play out in zero g behind his eyes and written down what would happen.

(That was the first time he was iced, four and a half weeks in, and he knew it wasn’t even for cheating it was for cheating so _obviously._ )

They kept giving him chances partly because they didn’t really know what else to do with him, and partly because every year or so a new teacher would get that dawning certainty that a kid who grew up in space would be the best child to fight a war there. Some of them even tried to mentor him. The last time he failed out, his most recent self-proclaimed adopted parent threw up her hands and told him he could spend the rest of his life floating aimlessly in battle rooms for all she cared, and Tobias knew she meant it as a far more cutting remark than it actually was.

The other kids never really knew what to do with him either. Tobias had been a permanent backdrop for longer than most of them had been in space, and some didn’t take too well to the sudden casting of an extra in a starring role. He measured his victories in uneventful days, in quiet allowances of him taking up space, and occasionally, in the way certain people’s eyes would actually catch on his face instead of looking through him. There was a guy named John or James or something who would give him this little nod of acknowledgment every time their paths crossed.

There was also this girl named Rachel, who he mostly never saw but who had one time noticed him blowing his hair out of his face absently and had slipped a hairtie onto his wrist without a word. When he’d gotten over his surprise and actually pulled his hair back with it, she’d caught his eye and given him a wink, and something about the memory settled firmly into the core of his identity.

But otherwise, Tobias pretty much kept his head down and held onto the things that stayed consistent between the weeks he was a student and the weeks he wasn’t: games, odd looks from Launchies, floating alone in silent practice rooms for so long he’d slip quietly into sleep.

3.

Given that eighty-five percent of why Jake wanted to go to Battle School was to follow his big brother, it was kinda stupidly ironic when Tom failed out the day Jake was brought up.

It was a gut-punch, when they told him. He’d been looking forward to seeing Tom since approximately ten minutes after Tom had left. It was always that bit of unspoken incentive— _work hard enough and you’ll get to go join him in space—_ and somehow also the fallback plan— _if you both fail out you’ll be here to meet him when he gets back._

They didn’t overlap on earth. The IF didn’t even tell him till he was on his shuttle. Jake got a shallow, congratulatory letter from Tom in his first week, and he bit his cheek on a wish for more substance but knew without a doubt that he’d only been allowed to see it for precisely that lack.

But in the end, Jake knew most kids who went to Battle School didn’t know a soul there, and he was lucky enough to still have a familiar face waiting for him. His cousin Rachel, who lived halfway around the world and whom he hadn’t seen in six years, was the first person to hug him when he got to Battle School, well before he realized she’d be the only person to hug him there. Rachel was all bright eyes and sharp edges and a hint of sheer recklessness, and they worked well together except in the times when they were entirely too similar.

And Jake’s best friend was pulled up a month after him. Marco settled back into Jake’s world like his month alone hadn’t been the single longest of his life, and Jake may or may not have failed a few tests to make sure they’d be advancing on the same timeline. He was good enough at the work in Battle School but everything got fundamentally simpler, more natural, with the people he trusted unconditionally around him.

He started to go down to the game room with Marco and just watch him play, hours and hours of paying attention to hands as much as screens. When he did the same to other people they tended to start glaring after a while, but it was somehow just as thoroughly fascinating to Jake, seeing how each of them approached the challenge and the performance. As they got older it just shifted to the practice rooms, tracking formations, patterns, but also commands and the language used to teach. He didn’t consciously try to construct a catalog of everyone’s skillsets but when Rachel asked him one day if he knew anyone who could help her with her accuracy he had four names on his tongue before she finished the sentence.

Jake made friends easily, quietly, but there was something weighty about human interaction here, like every person you talked to could end up defining you. And there was also something about how everyone measured each other up that kept Jake clinging onto the bright impressions of the people who _didn’t—_ Rachel, Marco, this quiet boy named Tobias who seemed to see everything without preconception.

Jake tried not to pay attention when he started hearing his own name in cut-off conversations, started noticing expectant glances and contemplative stares. He knew his own skill, knew he wasn’t anything special in any quantitative way, and by the time he realized he’d been thoroughly put on a pedestal he was nothing short of baffled. It sat uncomfortable under his skin.

The day Jake met Cassie, that friend of Rachel’s from home whose arrival made Rachel simultaneously overjoyed and noticeably quiet, he was struck by the immediate realization that she would be _important_ here. That she had something Battle School was missing, something fundamentally needed. Marco called it _really just a straightforward crush, honestly dude_ and, like, he wasn’t _wrong_ exactly, but Jake had also never been more sure of a person’s ability to change the world than he was of Cassie’s.

Jake knew without being able to put into words that certain people here, certain friendships, were more significant to the war than every physics lesson put together. More important than the battles, even. Maybe not more important than the military strategy books that Jake lost himself in sometimes, but that may have just been his history nerd heart talking. Either way he knew enough to hold on to them.

4.

Marco knew he was the smartest goddamn kid the IF had ever gotten lucky enough to catch but he also knew better than to let anyone see it.

Okay, maybe that was a bit of an exaggeration. Or a lot. But hey, no one had ever accused him of lacking a talent for hyperbole.

The fact was, Marco had just barely failed every Battle School aptitude test he’d ever taken, right up until the day he overheard his father tell their neighbor how his mother had died. _In Beijing on a business trip,_ his father had said, a little choked, _first time she’d ever been to China, she was so excited—._ And Marco had climbed the stairs back up to his room and sat down and started sketching trend lines, data charts, calculating the scores he’d need to pull himself back up into the right range.

Jake had given him one of those trademarked measuring looks of his the next day, and Marco punched him in the arm and asked if he’d seriously thought Marco was gonna let him have all the glory without at least a trusty sidekick to provide some comic relief.

As far as self-awareness went, Marco thought he had a pretty solid grasp of things. He knew his strengths (comedic timing, figuring out how things worked, the right kind of self-deprecation) and he definitely knew his weaknesses (humility, bravery, any form of leadership). He knew there was also a whole bunch of stuff he didn’t talk about. He would sometimes have these dreams about a line of buggers walking past him, each one naming character traits, all the things about him that should have been flaws but were instead identity. _Ruthless. Manipulative. Paranoid. Relentlessly pragmatic._

But if Marco had anything to say about it, nobody in Battle School would get past that first thing: he was really damn funny. And everything got a whole lot easier when you weren’t competition. He counted it as a win every time one of his classmates asked him to his face how he’d cheated his way up here.

The plan was, Jake would be the general. The whole school knew that much soon enough. And Jake knew Marco’s worth, maybe even better than Marco did, so why did anyone else’s opinion matter.

Marco got people. He could usually tell what made them tick, how to get under their skin. How to make them laugh. But he couldn’t always turn that into connections, didn’t really _understand_ anyone but his best friend. He came into Battle School knowing Jake would be his touchstone.

Marco saw it before Jake did, the way Jake collected people: what Jake would have called _friends_ but were more accurately variants on followers. People who looked to him, who orbited him, who knew after ten minutes’ conversation that Jake would probably be their commander sometime soon. Jake’s cousin Rachel, the one who grew up in France or Austria or something, had been in Battle School longer than any of them, and Marco felt the tangible shift when she started getting compared to Jake rather than the other way around. Marco took it as his personal responsibility to keep Jake from getting a big head about it.

And in the meantime, he wasn’t half bad at this whole school thing himself. At least, it was a whole lot better than Earth-school, what with the teacher-sponsored video games and all. Marco acquired a reputation for cheerfully losing to anyone at any new game up until the first time he won, at which point he set the high scores one by one.

All in all, Battle School felt a lot more like a holding pattern for Marco than it did for most people: waiting for the teachers to acknowledge that Jake’s scrawny eight-year-old self was ready for command, waiting for the games to get harder, waiting for the real war that always rested shadowy on the edges of Marco’s mind. It was easy to lose track of end goals in the day-to-day driving force here, but seeing the big picture had never remotely been one of Marco’s struggles. So he laughed and joked and played a hundred games, he stored Jake’s location in a constant corner of his awareness, and he sketched trend lines, data charts, calculating the shape and progress of the dawning war outside.

5.

Rachel belonged at Battle School in a way she’d never belonged anywhere on earth, and sometimes she thought that was probably supposed to bother her.

It was funny, because she didn’t exactly fit in. Most of the girls who made it up there kept their hair short and tried to pass for boys as long as their bodies would let them. But even at six years old Rachel knew she wouldn’t get far with that path, so the night before she left Earth she let her little sisters cover her arms with marker-drawn flowers and dove straight into that reckless first impression.

Her first teacher smirked at her, her first bunkmate leered. Her first commander asked if she was lost. By the end of the year, all three of them had been sent back down and there were rumors floating through the school about who not to cross. Rachel swallowed around the hard lump in her throat and tried to separate out bitterness from pride, satisfaction from regret.

There was something Rachel had always loved about feeling incongruous, like her pieces didn’t fit together, like she was defying stereotypes with her existence. She’d paint her nails before battles, use safety pins to shape her uniforms. Battle school didn’t really allow material possessions but she’d pretty much invented their black market in beautiful useless things.

And yet. Despite every skeptical once-over, every teacher’s double take, she started winning and kept winning and loved every second of it. It was like, she wasn’t actually all that good at all the _skills_ Battle School wanted. Rachel knew herself. She was a good student, but more from habit than from the quicksilver lightning brilliance of her classmates. She was a brave soldier, but not especially gifted at strategy or even marksmanship. It was something else, something brutal or primal or one of those other adjectives people used about children who scared them.

When the teachers pushed, she watched half her classmates break and the other half suffer but grow stronger and she wondered whether she was all the way human, because she didn’t hate a bit of it. She bit her tongue in her sleep every night, woke up with bloody teeth, but during the days the deliberate cruelties of Battle School never made her hands shake.

Rachel found friendship in respect, in admiration, she made frank assessment into love. She only sometimes missed the company of people who wanted nothing out of her. She was underestimated less, these days, but never not at all, and she didn’t think she’d ever quite grow tired of the rush of heady joy found in proving people wrong.

When her cousin showed up there was a certain immediate relief in having someone else who _got_ it, or at least got parts of it. They would sometimes skip dinner together and sit in the doorway to the practice rooms, legs floating out in zero g, talking about battles until a teacher came along to yell at them for blocking the way.

Rachel’s naïve gentle best friend from Earth was pulled up two years after her and it was only then that she started to worry about what Battle School does to people.

She avoided Cassie for forty-one hours and then woke suddenly in the dark to Cassie’s hand over her mouth. Rachel had to hold back a wild laugh, that Cassie still thought students up here would have the luxury of crying out when they were scared. Cassie looked like she didn’t know what to expect, hopeful and accusatory and a little bit betrayed. Of course she had noticed.

They hid under a table in the space-dark mess hall and caught up on the past two years in echoing whispers. Rachel didn’t tell Cassie about the time she’d punched her second commander in the face over strategy and then convinced her bunkmate to lie for her so she wouldn’t get iced. She didn’t tell Cassie about the battle she’d won nearly singlehanded by making herself into a projectile and breaking three ribs. She told Cassie about the nail polish, about acing her first physics exam, about which games she’d be good at. Cassie knew the best and worst of her, but Rachel wasn’t sure which this was.

After that night things were a little different, a little less black-and-white. Sometimes that made them harder. But sometimes Rachel looked at her cousin, at her best friend, and was so suddenly grateful for their grounding presences that she almost couldn’t breathe for it. She loved them with every bit of the viciousness she had in her, and that knowledge made jumping into each battle just a little bit less like stepping off of a cliff.

**Author's Note:**

> I’m not entirely sure what this plot-less bit of character study actually is, but after a passing reference in a certain Animorphs podcast convinced me to reread both of these series, this idea wouldn’t leave me alone. and frankly the shortage of animorphs battle school fic out there is a travesty.
> 
> also, I could not for the life of me figure out how to work Ax into this. if ax is your favorite I’m very sorry. I’m debating diving into a much longer story on this premise (with, yknow, an actual plot, maybe). if so I promise I’ll find out how to tie ax in there.
> 
> and yes, I was entirely handwavey about ages, nationalities, battle school classes/timelines, and the odds of multiple kids who knew each other on earth all being pulled up. let me live okay
> 
> feedback welcomed and much appreciated!


End file.
